An Excerpt from Man of the Future, Alex Mar’s essay on FM-2030 and the transhumanist movement, currently featured in theJune Issue:

“I am no longer my body,” FM wrote. “This body is simply a physical extension of me. The organs in my body the flesh the liquid the waste the limbs and bones—all these are becoming incidental to my existence.” Our flesh is on the verge of becoming the cast-off of our primitive self, less and less necessary for survival, the part of us that functions like “a bad robot.” He put it even more bluntly: “What is so sacrosanct about this so-called natural body that we should leave it untouched? What is so beautiful about our animal liver or kidney—or any blob of flesh or piece of skin? A horse’s ass is also skin. What is so romantic about defecating?”

FM believed that nothing was “artificial,” that anything we can conjure up on Earth is “natural” enough. What we make of ourselves, being human-made, will be more human than what we are today. In this way, the post-human is ultra-human.

“We did not choose our body. We had nothing to say about it. It has been imposed on us by evolution itself influenced by the hostile environment.

But we can now remake the human body into something beautiful varied fluid durable. Into something expressing our new visions.”

Kristen Iskandrian’s first novel, Motherest, is told in first-person by 18-year-old Agnes, who lives in “the middle of a New Jersey nowhere” and has just begun college in “the middle of a New England nowhere” in 1993.

I first saw Barbara Browning when she was naked, one hand extended to open a shower curtain, in our shared dorm bathroom, when we were both in our late teens. Barbara wore her hair short then, and her compact little body was so unapologetically whole, not a series of parts in the way I considered my own body to be.

In Visceral Poetics, poet Eleni Stecopolous' recent book on, among other things, struggling with chronic pain while trying to write a dissertation about Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopolous writes about her frustration with being undiagnosable.